1. Field
The described technology relates generally to an ion implanting system. More particularly, the described technology relates to an ion implanting system that can implant ions into a large glass substrate.
2. Description of the Related Art
Ion implantation is a commercially available technique to induce a dopant into a work-piece such as a thin film deposited on a semiconductor wafer or a glass substrate in order to change the conductivity of the work-piece.
A conventional ion implanting system includes an ion source that ionizes a predetermined dopant element and accelerates the ionized element to form an ion beam of regulated energy. The ion beam is then directed onto the surface of the work-piece.
Typically, energetic ions of the ion beam penetrate into a work piece and then become embedded in a crystal lattice of a material of the work piece to form an area having a predetermined conductivity.
An ion implantation process is performed under a high vacuum in an airtight process chamber that surrounds a work-piece handing assembly, a work-piece supporting device, and an ion source. Such a high vacuum environment prevents scattering of the ion beams due to collision with gas molecules and minimizes contamination of the work-piece by particles in air.
The conventional ion implanting system has a problem of taking a long time to process a work piece since the conventional system processes work-pieces sequentially.
Particularly, the size of display devices has increased through many generations. For ion implantation into a glass substrate in the manufacturing of a large display device (e.g., an eighth generation device), the ion implantation process is carried out by repeatedly reciprocating the glass substrate. Thus, the tact time of the ion implantation process for the large glass substrate is long due to the iteration of the ion implantation process.
Alternatively, the ion implantation into a large work-piece can be carried out by performing the process only once if a large enough ion source is used. However, the use of an ion source large enough to treat a large work-piece in a single pass is inefficient in terms of cost and space requirements.
Thus, a common goal of ion implanting systems is to increase the throughput of the system for large work-pieces. However, conventional systems have not yet fully satisfied such requirements in manufacturing ability and price and thus, development of an ion implantation system that can implant ions in accordance with the increasing size of display devices is desired.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the described technology and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.